This study is related to the central figures of Barocci's picture of Aeneas and his Family fleeing from Troy, a version of which is now in the Galleria Borghese in Rome (fig. 1), A. Emiliani, Federico Barocci, Bologna, 1985, II, p. 230, illustrated. The Rome picture, dated 1598, is an autograph replica painted for Giuliano della Rovere of a composition commissioned in 1586 by the Emperor Rudolf II and completed three years later. The Rudolf II picture was in the collection of the Duc d'Orléans in 1721 and was last mentioned in London in 1800.
The composition was engraved by Agostino Carracci in 1595, although probably after a lost study rather than after either of the two pictures.
Twelve drawings and a cartoon for this composition are known, Emiliani, op. cit., II, figs. 476-82, 484-6, 488-90. Two of these, one in the Uffizi in Florence and the other in the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, are for the group of Aeneas and Anchises. The former, on the verso of the drawing for Aeneas' wife, is a sketch for the present drawing; the latter is a study for the draperies of the two men.